The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and (...) Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally. (shrink)

John Laird was a Scottish philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and moral philosophy. In this early work, which was originally published in 1920, Laird set out to analyse some of the more perplexing problems of philosophical realism. The text includes a brief survey of philosophical realism at the beginning and critical notes throughout. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the works of Laird and the history of philosophy.

This article presents a process account of some typicality effects and related similarity-dependent accuracy and response time phenomena that arise in the context of supervised concept acquisition. We describe Symbolic Concept Acquisition (SCA), a computational system that acquires and activates category prediction rules. In contrast to gradient representations, SCA performs by probing for prediction rules in a series of discrete steps. For learning new rules, it acquires general rules but then incrementally learns more specific ones. In describing SCA, we emphasize (...) its functionality in terms of accuracy and efficiency and motivate its design within the set of symbolic mechanisms and memory structures defined by the Soar architecture (Laird, Newell & Rosenbloom, 1987). For replicating human behavior, we first show how SCA exhibits some typicality effects in the course of learning responding faster and more accurately to more typical test examples. Then, using data from human experiments, we evaluate SCA's qualitative predictions on accuracy and response time on individual dataset instances. We show how SCA's predictions correlate with human data across three experimental conditions concerning the effect of instruction on learning strategy. (shrink)

The essence of Hume’s eighteenth-century philosophy was that all the sciences were ‘dependent on the science of man’, and that the foundations of any such science need to rest on experience and observation. This title, first published in 1932, examines in detail how Hume interpreted ‘the science of man’ and how he applied his experimental methodology to humankind’s understanding, passions, social duties, economic activities, religious beliefs and secular history throughout his career. Particular attention is paid to the English, French and (...) Latin sources that shaped Hume’s theories. This is a full and fascinating title, of particular relevance to students with an interest in the philosophy of Hume specifically, as well as the philosophy of human nature and the methodologies applied to its study more generally_. _. (shrink)

In the pages that are to follow I shall try to discuss the validity and the sufficiency of a celebrated moral principle of Kant's “So act as to treat humanity, whether in thine own person or in that of any other, always as an end, never merely as a means.” In doing so, I shall say quite a lot about Kant, because his statement of the principle has had great influence, because he gave his genius to its elaboration, because he (...) illustrated and defended it in ways that deserve a close examination. On the other hand, my principal purpose is not to supply a piece of Kantian exegesis interspersed with sundry criticisms. In the main I want to discuss the principle, as people say, “on its merits.” In so far as I discuss Kant himself, I am doing so with the object of eliciting these merits. (shrink)

The proposed memory architecture by Barzykowski and Moulin is compelling, and could be improved by incorporating a rational analysis of the functional roles of involuntary autobiographical memory and déjà vu. Additionally, modeling these phenomena computationally would remove ambiguities from the proposal. We provide examples of past work that illustrate how the phenomena may be described more precisely.

In these grim and heavy years, despite all their inroads upon leisure, it seems likely that Shakespeare is read more widely and loved more deeply in this country than for many generations past, and since foreign communiqués as well as British ministers of the crown have been known to quote from him, it may be conjectured that the world as well as these islands is sensible of a part of the debt that humanity owes him. Be that as it may, (...) there is perennial refreshment in the blended wit and wisdom and fancy of his immortal pages, and a timely privilege for his countrymen in the fact that his Histories dealt with anguished, bitter years. To be sure, we read him more for his timelessness than for his timeliness, and allow, with the speaker in King John that ‘He is but a bastard to the times, That doth not smack of observation.’ Such observation is just philosophy ; but even philosophy reacts to the stimulus of its immediate environment. (shrink)

Anyone who thinks, for example, of “realism,” “sur-realism,” and the like in matters of art, or of the vulgar and journalistic vagueness in the use of the adjective “realistic,” may be prepared for the discovery that in philosophy also the term “realist” is either uncomfortably fluid or else acquires technical senses that are rather easily blurred. Our lexicographers tell us that, in its most general sense, “realism” indicates fidelity to what is real, particularly in the representation of matters of fact, (...) and that in philosophy it is an antithetic term, asserting the contrary either of. (shrink)

Theology, or the science of God, has to be distinguished from religion which might be godless, may contain very tittle of science, dogma, or creed, and sometimes consists very largely of the habit, attitude, or even the mode of public or private devotion or ritual.

There is a sense, perhaps, in which our present topic is like Mrs. Harris, or snakes in Ireland, or the reigning King of Portugal—that is to say that there is no such thing. For if by communist one means simply a “ red,” it is at least permissible to argue that Moscow and Leningrad are places where there can be no ethics at all. In saying this I do not mean to refer to any particular actions whose object has been (...) to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat, or in other words the next immediate step in the policy of these communists. What Zinoviev and others of them say is that they are engaged in a war against all bourgeois administrations, and that, being at war, they are not bound to accept the rules of French duelling, i.e . any outworn conventions, whether these are called ethical or not. Since it is admitted, I suppose, by nearly every. (shrink)

It is the custom, nowadays, to say that “realism” is very dead indeed, and to speak of it invariably in the past tense, or only in the historical present. What happened, we are told, was that, during the first quarter of the twentieth century, two distinct bodies of men propounded either “naïf” or “new” realism. The naif realists followed Mr. G. E. Moore—to some extent and without his consent; and they were called naif because the masculine form of the adjective (...) expressed their rugged creed better than the more usual feminine form. (shrink)

When Adam Smith, at the age of forty, resigned his professorship in Glasgow and devoted himself, after three years of travel, to the composition of his Wealth of Nations, he set himself to elaborate the sociological portion of his course on Moral Philosophy. Indeed, at the conclusion of his Moral Sentiments, written during the tenure of his professorship, he had promised “ another discourse ” on the “ general principles of law and government,” including a historical treatment and an account (...) of “ police, revenue and arms.” To be sure, when the work appeared, it was not, in essentials, a continuation of the researches of Montesquieu, and had no authentic connection with Smith’s earlier treatise on morals, Instead, the bulk of it was a strict, and as we should say, a scientific, inquiry into theorigin and conditions of opulence in human communities. Nevertheless, it expounds and is even dominated by a certain social philosophy which is not too convincing when nakedly put. Smith's abiding fame, accordingly, rests more upon the strict scientific analysis of his book than upon its implicit philosophy. Still, the philosophy was there. It had, and it still has, influence. A short discussion of it, therefore, is likely to have something more than historical interest. (shrink)

John Laird was a Scottish philosopher who specialised in metaphysics and moral philosophy. In this book, which was first published in 1929, Laird provides a detailed analysis of the philosophical nature of value. The text begins with a discussion of the main definitions of value, before going through a more detailed examination of the various applications of value in turn. This book will appeal to anyone with an interest in value and the history of philosophy.